


How to Tell a Love Story

by thearchangelofsass



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Experimental writing, M/M, free form, idk what this is but i have a lot of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearchangelofsass/pseuds/thearchangelofsass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in my english class we had this assignment to write an imitation piece based off of "How to Tell a True War Story" by Tim O'Brien. this is my stormpilot take on that with "how to tell a love story".</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Tell a Love Story

**Author's Note:**

> yes i am aware i'm a loser

            This is how to tell a love story. First you take a number and make it a man. Only, you aren’t really making it a man. The number already had all of the human qualities of kindness and valor and truth. He just needed to know he was a man. This is where the other half of your story comes in. You take a force of nature, one that traverses the galaxy in an instant. Who carries a rebellion on his shoulders, supported only by his x-wing and his astromech droid and you give him a leather jacket and tousled hair and a heart that bleeds. Then these two men meet by chance, and the stars will fill them up.

            This is how to tell a love story. You take a number and you add in a pinch of sentience, and a dash of free will. With trembling hands and agitated eyes he rescues his other half, and the number wonders how the powers that be thought they could contain an angel in a human vessel. The number takes the pilot’s hand and they fly off, metaphorically and physically, into the night.

            This is how to tell a love story. You need a conflict. You need beams of fire that blow them apart, the air filled with deadly light before they are blasted out of the sky. You need a pile of wreckage in the swirling sand, with a rising column of smoke as dark as hopelessness. You need the number to cry into the pilot’s jacket at night, the jacket of the man who gave the number a name. You need the pilot to miss the number. Or rather not the number, but the man.

            This is how to tell a love story. You don’t. You let them tell it for you. Because there is nothing stopping them except the tarmac between them when the pilot and the man meet again. And when the pilot who guarded his heart with shrapnel pieces melts into the man’s arms the planet will start spin a little off axis because it can’t handle the weight of the events that have unfolded. And you start to put your pen down, because maybe you can’t either.

            This is how to tell a love story. You can’t have a happy ending. Maybe a hopeful one, yes, but nobody is riding off into the sunset without a scar on their soul and scabs on their hands. You take a flame, the brightest in the galaxy, with a golden center, and you let ice work its way through the cracks. You let the flame dim enough, not completely, but enough so that when the man is a number again and is being wheeled across the runway in a stretcher the pilot feels like his body has been broken into a thousand pieces and can barely see through the film of his tears as he follows the stretcher into the darkness of an exploded sun.

            This is how to tell a love story. You take a silver arrow and launch it through the murky fog of unconsciousness of the number and hope that it is enough.

 

            It has to be enough.

 

            And Atlas, still carrying the fate of the galaxy, can only cry “Wake up. Wake up Finn!” as you watch, helpless to do anything as hope flickers out.

 

            This is how to tell a love story.

 

            You cry.

           

**Author's Note:**

> come scream about stormpilot with me on tumblr @polaroidpidge


End file.
